Groundbreaking artist Tony Conrad dies at 76

By BERT GAMBINI

“He is one of the visionaries who established the department’s reputation and he remained a visionary his entire life.”

Josephine Anstey, professor and chair

Department of Media Study

SUNY Distinguished Professor Tony Conrad, a boundary-stretching,
interdisciplinary artist and UB faculty member for nearly 40 years
who emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of both experimental film and
music, died Saturday in Hospice Buffalo, Cheektowaga, following a
battle with prostate cancer. He was 76.

Conrad joined the UB faculty as an assistant professor in 1979,
having served since 1976 as a visiting professor. In 2004, he
received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in
Scholarship and Creative Activities. He was named a SUNY
Distinguished Professor in 2011.

He retired from his faculty position in the Department of Media
Study at the start of the spring semester.

“Tony’s legacy will be his great creativity and his
artistic need to discover new and different ways of experiencing
sound and image,” said Bruce Pitman, dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences. “His innovate touch reached so many
aspects of the art world and helped expand all the mediums he
entered.”

Conrad’s varied and notable career trampled convention and
created new possibilities that ignored traditional expectations,
moving through previously untraveled artistic ground in mediums
ranging from motion pictures to music, sound to sculpture.

“It all adds up to artist,” he said in a 2015
interview.

His creative output help establish UB as a center of avant-garde
expression and made him a dynamic and multifaceted leading voice
who confronted and pushed establishment limits into new frontiers
of brilliance.

“Tony played a crucial leadership role for the department
with his expansive vision of media study as a vital area of
research and creative activity,” said Josephine Anstey, chair
and associate professor in the Department of Media Study. “He
is one of the visionaries who established the department’s
reputation and he remained a visionary his entire life.”

Conrad studied violin briefly at the Peabody Conservatory of
Music, followed by an interlude at Harvard University, where he
earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. But he left
Cambridge in the early 1960s to “mess up the music
world.”

He was at the vanguard of minimal music, disrupting music
culture by abandoning any semblance of western composition with an
improvisational approach that included manipulating harmonic tones
and sustained sounds.

The minimal music stream quickly branched with performers like
Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley pursuing sustained rhythm
and repetition. Conrad, meantime, was working with a group of
people who concentrated on sustained sound — very long notes
that could be clustered into sustained chords.

The Velvet Underground adapted the breakthrough expression
Conrad helped create that would later become socially influential
in bands like Sonic Youth.

Conrad revisited that tradition last year with a performance in
New York City to celebrate his 75th birthday with his friend of 40
years, Charlemagne Palestine, a fellow “perverted
minimalist,” Conrad said at the time.

“We’ve learned a lot from living with this
tradition, but we don’t sanctify it.”

Having dismantled music, Conrad turned to film in the early
’70s, moving his avant-garde sensibilities into a new medium
that amounted to a creative upheaval as significant as what he had
already accomplished musically.

His influential film “The Flicker” (1966) is
considered a cornerstone of structural filmmaking, a genre
characterized by an apparently fixed camera and a strobing effect
that stresses formalist examinations over narrative content.

Images in the “The Flicker” are either completely
black or completely white, jumping on screen to the pulsing audio
of film stock rolling through a camera’s wheelhouse. If
Conrad’s lens was fixed, his microphone was not, capturing
sound at various levels of intensity and clarity, with synthesized
delays and reverb that create a two-fold sensory strobe of not only
sight, but sound as well.

The film is not easy to watch and opens with its speakeasy
soundtrack under a slide warning of the picture’s dizzying
qualities.

“A physician should be in attendance,” advises the
slide’s closing sentence.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles used
“The Flicker” as the centerpiece of its 1996 exhibit
“Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film since 1945.”

This was the first major American exhibition to focus on the
vibrant postwar relationship between cinema and the visual
arts.

That confluence of film and visual arts, in fact, helped inspire
Conrad’s “Yellow Movies,” which began as ways of
thinking about how painting techniques and approaches could be
applied to the art of filmmaking.

Like the sustained tones of his music, “Yellow
Movies” engage people over long spaces of time and consist of
painted squares resembling the outline of a movie.

Based on the properties of degradation, Conrad’s
“Yellow Movies” — films with running times that
are decades-long — chronicle the paint changing over time.
Cheap paint, specifically. In this case, gull white, interior
latex.

Conrad knew there was no way to measure the change, so the film,
like all movies, happens in the imagination of the viewer.

“What kind of movie could it possibly be?” asked
Conrad in a 2008 audio interview with the Museum of Modern American
Art “Well, it doesn’t look exactly like a comedy, but I
think of it that way.”

At the time of his death, Conrad was working on numerous
projects, including a series of paintings. He also had plans to
publish some of his essays and write a book on the history of music
theory and Western culture.

He also was to be the closing speaker for the Department of
Media Study’s PLASMA series on May 2, discussing innovations
in media and culture shaping the new millennium communication
world.

That event at UB’s Center for the Arts will go forward as
planned in tribute to Conrad.

“Tony set an example of creative vigor, playfulness and
excellence for generations of students, and influenced not only our
own alumni but many other media artists,” said Anstey.

He is survived by his wife, Paige Sarlin, assistant professor in
the Department of Media Study, and a son, Ted Conrad of
Buffalo.

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